BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Monday approached the Delhi High Court against the alleged failure of authorities to decide his application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act seeking details of “Chinese encroachment on Indian territory” from the central government.
Justice Subramanium Prasad issued notice to the Centre and sought its stand on the former MP’s appeal for a direction to the concerned authorities to give an “effective response” to his query.
In his petition, Mr Swamy said in November 2022 he filed an RTI application asking the Home Ministry to provide details on the extent to which “sovereign land has been acquired by People’s Republic of China, across the mutually agreed upon Line of Actual Control”.
Loss of sovereign land
The petition stated that the RTI query also sought to know how much Indian “sovereign land has been lost due to further creation of buffer zones or ‘no man’s land’ since 2014”.
The RTI query also sought to know the number of times there has been “Chinese military incursions into Indian territory across the mutually agreed upon Line of Actual Control since 1996”, and “under what agreement or otherwise India had ceded the Aksai Chin region to China”.
The RTI also sought information on the number of people displaced in India due to the creation of buffer zones, the petition added.
The petition said Mr Swamy did not receive any effective response to the RTI query, which was transferred from one department to another, leading him to file the first appeal under the RTI Act and then approach the Chief information Commissioner.
“Nearly six months after filing the second appeal, the petitioner has not received any response whatsoever,” the petition claimed adding that the people have the right to know the status of their territorial integrity.
“When the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the nation is being questioned in the form of Chinese occupation of Indian land in Ladakh across the LAC, the people-from whom the sovereignty is derived-have a ‘right to know’ the status quo of the territorial integrity,” the petition said.
The high court will hear the case again in January next year.
